NRA News: Glamour Honoring Malala, Giffords Makes "The World A More Dangerous Place For Women"

NRA News host Cam Edwards claimed that Glamour magazine's Women of the Year Awards had an "anti-gun agenda" and made "the world a more dangerous place for women" because the event honored victims of gun violence, including Pakistani education reformer Malala Yousafzai who was shot by the Taliban.

Glamour's 23rd annual award event held on November 11 also honored former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) -- who was wounded during a 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona -- and Sandy Hook Elementary School teacher Kaitlin Roig-Debellis, who saved the lives of 15 first-graders during the December 2012 mass shooting at her school in Newtown, Connecticut. Yousafzai, who at age 15 was targeted for assassination by the Taliban for protesting a ban on female education, told the crowd, "I believe the gun has no power at all."

On the November 14 edition of NRA News show Cam & Company, guest Laura Carno, the founder of conservative non-profit I Am Created Equal, suggested that Yousafzai could have defended herself from the Taliban with a gun and later said that the award event should have invited Carno and other female gun rights activists.

According to Carno, "If you want to talk about guns at all in the story of Malala or the teacher at Sandy Hook, or any of those, is these are women who should have the choice to be armed. Malala sure couldn't be armed and so many schools have gun free zone policies that teachers are not allowed to be armed."

Carno, who helped lead efforts to recall two Colorado state senators over their support for stronger gun laws, suggested that Glamour should invite her as well as Washington Times senior opinion editor Emily Miller -- who recently published a falsehood-filled book about guns -- and conservative blogger Stacy Washington to an awards banquet:

CARNO: The number of people who say, "Oh my goodness I need to take action right now to be able to protect myself and to be able to choose my own self-defense," especially women saying, "Okay, hang on a second, this right might go away, I'm going to make sure that I have the ability to protect myself." People get it, normal people get it, it's just our government types and the media folks like those who put on the Glamour Women of the Year Awards, I don't know that they are going to invite people like me, or Emily Miller, or Stacy on the Right, I don't know that they are inviting us to any of these award banquets coming up, but they're the ones trying to push this agenda.

Edwards reacted to Carno's comment by stating that while Glamour "may have the very best of intentions in pushing an anti-gun agenda," the magazine's misguided views mean that "ultimately what the ideas that they're pushing prohibit people from protecting themselves, they prohibit people from exercising self-defense, they make the world a more dangerous place for women across this country."

Carno also made false attack on a Huffington Post article by Morra Aarons-Mele that favorably recapped Glamour's event by claiming that the author "doesn't offer any evidence or proof that reducing the number of guns makes a society safer." "She attempts it when she says that women are more likely to get killed by a gun in the United States than other countries. And I think, okay, there are some countries where a woman is more likely to get stoned to death than in the United States, it doesn't make those deaths any better or any worse," she added.

Carno falsely claimed that Aarons-Mele "[is] not pointing to any facts that reducing gun ownership reduces gun violence because those facts don't exist, it's the opposite." In fact, Aarons-Mele's claim in her article that "women in the U.S. are 11 times more likely to be murdered by guns than women in other high-income countries" comes from an academic study by Harvard University injury prevention researchers.

Indeed, Carno's claim that "facts don't exist" to suggest a relationship between gun ownership and gun violence is false. As the Harvard Injury Control Research Center notes, "Case-control studies, ecological time-series and cross-sectional studies indicate that in homes, cities, states and regions in the US, where there are more guns, both men and women are at higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide."